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TIMES-TRIBUNE FILE Lackawanna Station was built in 1908 with a great deal of attention to detail, which gives the structure a sense of grandeur. Railroads were a critical element for the growth of business.

TIMES-TRIBUNE FILE In the early years of Scranton, railroads were essential to move the coal to places like the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Co., pictured in 1886.

T oday’s Scranton business landscape finds precedent in the city’s earliest years, descendants of mining and railroad activity.

While Scranton may have been settled because of the proximity to water, which equaled power, the city became a crossroads, first for rail and later for asphalt.

Railroads were essential to move the large amounts of coal from the region to markets. Scranton Iron Furnaces pioneered manufacturing of the T-rail and Scranton became a rail hub, a legacy preserved by the Steamtown National Historic Site.

After the automobile swept the United States, Scranton became linked to the rest of the country by interstates and the turnpike. That made it easier for manufacturers to get goods to market, and the area became a warehousing and logistics hub.

“It’s a cliché, but when it comes to cities and real estate — it’s location, location, location,” said James Cummings, a veteran economic developer now with Mericle Commercial Real Estate. “Within 200 miles of Pittston, we can reach 51 million people.”

That centrality to old East Coast cities has always helped Scranton. A number of grocers set up distribution centers in the Scranton area, and food storages and produce

distributors still operate in the city’s north. Today the entire region, often referred to as the I-81 Corridor, is a distributing hub for retailers and others.

The region is best known for anthracite coal, the commodity that, in conjunction with railroads, put Scranton on the map and employed tens of thousands as miners and others.

To the extent that Scranton had a diversified economy in the 1800s, it had coal to thank. The inexpensive, abundant energy source drew factories and mills to the area. As the industrial era chugged on, the manner of efficiency of furnaces improved as well. The black mountains of low-carbon culm, once thought to be waste, could now be used as fuel.

Garment factories and cigar rolling operations moved into the area starting in the late 19th century to take advantage of a workforce of women and daughters.

“In families of recent immigrants or the working class, everyone worked,” Ms. Moran-Savakinus said. “For the industrialist, this population in Scranton was a ready work force.”

Starting with mills and later factories, the garment factories relocated to the area from places such as Patterson, New Jersey, to avoid unions, which has been adding to production costs, said Robert Wolensky, Ph.D., professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin and author of several books on Northeast Pennsylvania history. The so called “runaway shops” found a ready workforce. Scranton Lace, for many years one of the city’s largest employers, was an internationally known brand. “The anthracite region had a family economy where dad worked in the mines, sons worked as breaker boys, mom took in sewing or boarders and daughters worked in the mills,” Mr. Wolensky said.

Also, garment work and cigar rolling, which were predominantly a female activity, continued to offer some security for families in the 20th century when strikes, an injury or layoffs sidelined male workers.

The garment industry necessitated the opening of the Scranton Button Co. founded in 1880s. Button making translated to plastics and the company began making shellac phonograph records, a sideline that became a specialty. The company become a division of Capital Records in 1949. A Capital plant manager helped launch Specialty Records, later known WEA Manufacturing and Cinram, in Olyphant. Mining and colliery operations’ need for metal for nearly every aspect of coal extraction, fostered the development of the metal forming industry, the successor of which exists today.

The health care industry, the largest employment sector in Scranton, includes several hospitals, allied services providers and now the Commonwealth Medical College. It traces back to a Moses Taylor Hospital in 1892, opened to care for employees of the DL&W Railroad and the Lackwanna Iron and Coal Co. Moses Taylor was the president of the railroad.

“The founding of Moses Taylor may be portrayed as a humanitarian effort, but it was just as much about keeping workers in a condition to work.”

An effort to educate miners blossomed into International Correspondence School, founded in the city in 1891. The distance learning pioneer helped jump start a book binding industry and companies such as Haddon Craftsman in Scranton and other publishing companies set roots in the area such as Penguin, WW Norton and PA Hutchinson.

As mining declined the business community banded together and began a private nonprofit economic development effort under the Scranton Chamber of Commerce known as the Scranton Plan to lure other businesses to the area. A major victory was the Murray plant where 7,000 out-of-work miners began manufacturing B-29 Bomber components. In 1945, the allied victory meant near economic catastrophe for Scranton, as orders for shells, bombers, parachutes and radar were cancelled just as soldiers returned from the war. The chamber founded the Scranton Lackawanna Industrial Building Co., to take ownership of the Murray plant and lease it back to the company convincing it to make household items. It later developed the Keystone and Stauffer industrial parks, selling bonds to citizens to finance the projects.

“If not the chambers in this area, by constructing the first shell buildings and development of speculative building at a time when private developers would not have, it’s a scary prospect to think what would have become of the area,” Mr. Cummings said.

Contact the writer: dfalchek@timesshamrock.com

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